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<blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 3652930" data-attributes="member: 11760">As readers of my Story Hour know, the Midwood campaign effectively -- and now explicitly -- has two major camps of characters. One group is heroic and noble and the other ... isn't. (We've argued about whether one of them in particular is actually evil.)But for all of them, I laid out the campaign setting to them, via our wiki, and some of them picked gods or backgrounds that sort of surprised me. At that point -- and I know this is easier with the gentle pace of pbp -- I stepped back and tried to flesh out each of their choices for the game world, putting the new info into the wiki, so that we could all be on the same page. Some of this necessitated discussions back and forth in private messages. (&quot;Could Estanna be one of the saints of Lothian's church?&quot; &quot;I'd rather not, actually, my character doesn't much like the Church of Lothian.&quot; &quot;How about her being an old Prustan god that is sometimes said to be the inspiration for a made-up saint?&quot; &quot;That works.&quot;)I think Shar, while a problematic choice, could be made to work even in a mainstream good-guy-centric FR game (which I see now this is not), but I'd probably want to have more extended discussion with the player about the choice, why they picked it and what they envision its effects to be.Maybe it's just my players, but they LOVE subterfuge and secrecy, and having a religion they could participate in right under the other player characters' noses would appeal to pretty much all of them. And I'm such a dork, I'd probably have fun coming up with ciphers and codewords to use in the game. If the player realizes an NPC is testing to see if he's a member of the faith, great, if not, that'll be fun, too. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I do like to validate player choices, but I also don't want to let a player intentionally take something inherently rare or difficult and strip it of those qualities. In those cases, I'd steer them to another faith instead.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Whizbang Dustyboots, post: 3652930, member: 11760"] As readers of my Story Hour know, the Midwood campaign effectively -- and now explicitly -- has two major camps of characters. One group is heroic and noble and the other ... isn't. (We've argued about whether one of them in particular is actually evil.) But for all of them, I laid out the campaign setting to them, via our wiki, and some of them picked gods or backgrounds that sort of surprised me. At that point -- and I know this is easier with the gentle pace of pbp -- I stepped back and tried to flesh out each of their choices for the game world, putting the new info into the wiki, so that we could all be on the same page. Some of this necessitated discussions back and forth in private messages. ("Could Estanna be one of the saints of Lothian's church?" "I'd rather not, actually, my character doesn't much like the Church of Lothian." "How about her being an old Prustan god that is sometimes said to be the inspiration for a made-up saint?" "That works.") I think Shar, while a problematic choice, could be made to work even in a mainstream good-guy-centric FR game (which I see now this is not), but I'd probably want to have more extended discussion with the player about the choice, why they picked it and what they envision its effects to be. Maybe it's just my players, but they LOVE subterfuge and secrecy, and having a religion they could participate in right under the other player characters' noses would appeal to pretty much all of them. And I'm such a dork, I'd probably have fun coming up with ciphers and codewords to use in the game. If the player realizes an NPC is testing to see if he's a member of the faith, great, if not, that'll be fun, too. ;) I do like to validate player choices, but I also don't want to let a player intentionally take something inherently rare or difficult and strip it of those qualities. In those cases, I'd steer them to another faith instead. [/QUOTE]

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